“It’s Just the Change”: Addressing Gender Bias in Women’s Healthcare
I saw a patient this week—exhausted, frustrated, and on the verge of giving up. She’d consulted multiple doctors, each one dismissing her symptoms with vague reassurances or reductive labels. She told me, “I feel like they just think I’m a middle-aged woman going through the change of life and nobody is listening to me.”
Her words were not unique. They echoed countless others I’ve heard over the years—women whose legitimate health concerns are minimized, misattributed, or ignored altogether.
This is not an isolated incident. It reflects a deeply embedded and persistent reality in healthcare: women, particularly during transitional phases such as menstruation, menopause, and chronic pain syndromes, are routinely invalidated. Their symptoms are too often reframed as emotional, hormonal, or simply inevitable—rather than investigated, understood, and treated with clinical seriousness.
A Systemic Issue: The Dismissal of Women’s Pain
Research consistently shows that women’s pain is taken less seriously than men’s. Studies published in The British Medical Journal and The Lancet have highlighted disparities in diagnostic timelines, treatment efficacy, and clinician responsiveness. Conditions such as endometriosis, adenomyosis, and perimenopausal symptoms are frequently underdiagnosed or misattributed to psychological causes.
Key patterns include:
Menstrual pain being normalized, despite its potential to signal underlying pathology.
Menopausal symptoms—including cognitive changes, fatigue, and joint pain—being dismissed as inevitable or exaggerated.
Chronic pain conditions in women receiving delayed referrals and fewer treatment options compared to men with similar complaints.
Medical Gaslighting: A Barrier to Trust and Care
Medical gaslighting refers to the minimization or denial of a patient’s symptoms by healthcare professionals. For women, this often manifests as:
Being told symptoms are “just stress” or “hormonal.”
Having legitimate concerns reframed as emotional instability.
Feeling patronized or dismissed during consultations.
This erodes trust, delays diagnosis, and contributes to poorer health outcomes. It also disproportionately affects women from marginalized communities, compounding existing inequalities.
Structural Blind Spots in Clinical Practice
The gender data gap in medical research has long been acknowledged. Historically, clinical trials excluded women due to hormonal variability, resulting in diagnostic tools and treatment protocols that are male-centric by default. Today, this legacy persists in several ways:
Limited training in gynaecological and menopausal health for general practitioners.
Inadequate integration of women’s health into strategic planning and service design.
Underfunding of research into female-specific conditions.
Recommendations for Systemic Change
To address these disparities, healthcare systems must adopt a multi-pronged approach:
Mandatory education on women’s health across all levels of clinical training.
Investment in research focused on female pain, hormonal transitions, and chronic conditions.
Patient-led service design, ensuring lived experience informs policy and practice.
Cultural reform within clinical environments to foster empathy, validation, and accountability.
Listening as a Clinical Imperative
When women say they feel unheard, it is not a communication failure—it is a clinical and ethical concern. Healthcare must evolve to meet the needs of all patients equitably, and that begins with listening, believing, and acting.
